Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Bush v. Gore regrets: She shouldn’t have retired. - Slate Magazine

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Bush v. Gore regrets: She shouldn’t have retired. - Slate Magazine: "Justice Sandra Day O’Connor should never have retired from the Supreme Court. She is an 83-year-old with plenty of energy, which she expends hearing lower-court cases, giving speeches, and making me want to tear my hair out by talking like the sensible moderate-liberal she refused to be consistently on the court. Why didn’t O’Connor voice these views when she had power? I’m prompted to my hair tearing by O’Connor’s statement to the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board that, oh, maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea for the Supreme Court to have decided the 2000 presidential election by taking Bush v. Gore and issuing the ruling that ended the Florida recount. Here are her musings, as the Tribune reported: ‘ ‘It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,’ O’Connor said last Friday. ‘Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ ’ The case, she said, ‘stirred up the public’ and ‘gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation.’ ‘Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision,’ she said. ‘It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.’ ’ What is with that weird disembodied ‘it’? That word allows O’Connor to distance herself from a decision she was very much a part of. Replace every ‘it’ with ‘we.’ Or even with ‘I,’ since O’Connor could have swung the 5-4 ruling in the opposite direction by switching sides. "

(Via.)